Immediacy. With paid search, once you identify keywords for which you would like your site to be listed in a search engine results page, or a relevant non-search site for which you would like your ad to appear, you can have your ad appearing in a matter of hours, if not minutes. To get your site listed as a natural result on a search results page will likely require months of time and a considerable amount of work. Most other forms of advertising also require considerable production time.

Flexibility. Imagine that your company has just spent a large sum of money producing a TV ad. One night, you see your TV ad and decide that you just don't like it and want to change it immediately. That would be a very expensive nightmare. By contrast, a pay per click ad can be changed at any time, with the new ad running in place of the old with no delay. Pay per click gives you incredible flexibility to make real-time changes to your campaign based on data or personal preference.

Transparency. With paid search, you have complete clarity regarding the performance of your advertising. Unlike traditional advertising, such as print, radio, or TV ads, with paid search you will know exactly how many leads or sales resulted from your promotions. Not only will you know in a broad sense, you will know down to the level of exactly what keyword and what ads generated the most clicks or conversions. This makes it much easier to tweak your ad campaign for maximum profitability.

Portability. You will learn much from your pay per click campaign that can be ported to other advertising media. For example, if you discover a particular keyword that converts at a very high rate, then you might be well-served to engage in a search engine optimization campaign so that your site appears in the natural search listings for that same keyword. Or you might discover that one of your ads with a particular headline does very well, indicating that it might be a headline or slogan that would work well for your off-line marketing.

Scalability. If you want to advertise on TV, you have to have the budget to produce the TV commercial. If you want to run a print ad, you may find the expense prohibitive. By contrast, with a pay per click campaign, you can begin advertising immediately regardless of how small your budget is. If you are running standard search engine results page text link ads, there is no production cost other than the time it takes you to write your ads. And even if your budget is only $10 per day, you can still get in the game (unless you are in one of the extremely expensive categories such as mortgage loans or accident attorneys). Once you have a larger budget, it is very easy to scale your campaign up.

The above list represents the five major advantages of pay per click compared to other forms of advertising. It is a medium available to even the smallest advertiser that offers great flexibility and affordability. If you are currently spending money on traditional advertising, I highly recommend that you give paid search a try.